“A cool world with steampunk and zombies combined. . . . The voice is very real and gritty and I felt immersed in the world. Abercombie-edgy and a quick read at that.”
--
Felicia Day
“
Falling Sky grabbed me right away and held me to the last sentence. . . . [It’s] like Hemingway meets
The Walking Dead.”
--
Tad Williams
Rajan Khanna is back this month (today, actually) with his latest action packed adventure
Rising Tide. Ben Gold sacrificed his ship in an effort to prevent pirates from attacking the hidden island city of Tamoanchan. Now Malik, an old friend turned enemy, has captured Ben and Miranda, the scientist Ben loves. With Miranda held hostage, Ben has to do Malik’s dirty work.
Miranda has plans of her own, though. She has developed a test for the virus that two generations ago turned most of the population into little more than beasts called Ferals. She needs Ben’s help to rescue a group of her colleagues to perfect the test—but first they must rescue themselves.
Check out the first chapter excerpt below to dive (pun totally intended. You'll see.) into this post-apocalyptic world!
_______________________________________________________
CHAPTER ONE
The lights come and wake me from
dying.
At
least I must be dying because I’m wet and cold and bleeding and everything
seems broken inside of me. All around me I can smell smoke and burning gas and
the sea.
Inside
of me, a voice insists that there’s something next to me. Something good.
Something to save me. But when I try to turn, everything goes black again.
Death hovers, close by.
The lights bring me back, dancing over me with a roaring
hum. I remember stories I read when I was a kid, stories of angels—bright,
blinding, flying angels. Have they finally come for me?
Some moments pass, my head spinning,
and then they’re lifting me up, out of the raft, and into the sky. Where are you taking me? I want to ask.
But I can’t. And something about leaving the ocean, going up into the sky,
feels right.
More time passes—hands touching me that I can’t shrug
off. I slip away once or twice.
When I awake again, I hear someone saying to take me to
the infirmary. It’s apt because I’m very fucking infirm. Anyone would be after
the last few days I’ve had. Beaten, shot, strung out on painkillers, beaten
again, stabbed, then dropped from an exploding airship into cold ocean waters.
Well, when I say dropped,
I mean more like I jumped. But it seemed like a good idea at the time.
Thinking about that makes me think of the Cherub, my airship, which was named
after angels, and the last time I saw her, ripping apart into a bright fireball
as I fell. It brings on pain of a different flavor. She was more than just my
home—she was my safety, my security, my freedom.
“Miranda,” I manage to gasp. She’s
the other woman in my life. Or rather, the one who’s left. She fell with me,
into the ocean. We somehow both managed to survive, huddled in the bottom of
a life raft, clinging to one another, wet and cold, our ears still ringing from the
explosion, flames still dotting the water where the fiery wreckage fell.
We lay there, together, and I
couldn’t even think. All I did was hold Miranda and take comfort in the fact that
we were alive and together and she was solid in my arms. Later, I thought that if we
managed to make it through the night into the morning, that we might have a shot.
She was what was next to me, I
remember. She’s what I was trying to find.
“Miranda,” I repeat.
“Who?” a voice asks.
“That’s her name,” another voice
replies. “The woman.”
“Where is she?” I ask. “Is she
okay?”
“She’ll be back soon,” one of the
voices says.
I reach up for the arms nearest me,
grip them as hard as I can. “No,” I say.
“I need to know.”
Then my grip wavers and my arms go watery and the person
pulls away from my grasp. “Give him another
one,” a voice says.
Then I feel a sharp pinch.
And the world draws away around me.
* * *
I’m below the ocean, only this time it’s warm and thick,
not the shocking, freezing thing it was after I fell. It’s comfortable. Almost
welcoming. I find this amusing since I have always preferred the sky. But
slowly I feel myself start to rise and the air gets thinner and brighter, and
then I’m opening my eyes to . . . light.
I smell metal and the sea and antiseptic. As my vision
clears, I realize I’m lying on a table—cold metal, but with some kind of tarp
draped over it. I’m not wearing a shirt, and my wounds have been bandaged. I
ache, but the pain is dulled, lost in the wake of the painkillers I’ve
apparently been given.
A woman wearing a surgical mask
sees me stir, then leaves the room.
As I sit up, feeling the skin
pulling on my wounds, and grunting because of it, the door opens again and a
man enters what I now realize is the infirmary.
The
metal tables and the counters and instruments all paint the picture. But my
attention is drawn to the man.
Malik.
He’s looking better than he was the last time I saw him.
His skin is tanned by the sun to a light-brown color. He’s wearing his black
hair long and he has an extremely neatly trimmed beard, which is a nice trick,
seeing as how most of the tools for that kind of thing have long since turned
to shit. He stands at the edge of my table and eyes me up and down.
“Mal,” I
say, suddenly on edge. “You’re alive.”
“Benjamin,” he says, like he just picked a bullet out of
his teeth. “As sharp as ever.”
“My God,” I say. “I had no idea.” I feel something hard
lodge in my chest. “Thank you for patching me up.”
He shakes his
head. Like everything he does, it’s a precise movement, no wasted energy. “That
wasn’t me. That was courtesy of your companion.” “Miranda?”
He nods.
“How is she? Where is she? I need to see her.” I start to
get up off the table, but he pushes me back, firmly and precisely, and my chest
erupts into a constellation of pain despite the drugs I’m on.
“You don’t get to make demands,” he says, and I see his
carefully cultivated mask slip for a moment. What’s behind is rage. And I know
exactly why. Mal and I go way back, and our last meeting didn’t end so well.
He straightens and examines his gloves. “Miranda is safe
and unharmed, Benjamin. That will have to suffice for now.”
My mind races, then falls back into
an old, familiar pattern of movement. Even through the painkillers it’s a place
I’m used to—assess, look for opportunities, survive. It’s clear that Mal isn’t
happy with me, and I’m not sure I blame him. But he still pulled me out of the
ocean. Still let Miranda patch me up. So I’m on unsteady ground. I don’t know
what he wants. And so I can’t use that.
“What happened to you?”
He knows what I’m asking. How did he survive? What
happened after I saw him last?
He looks away for a moment. “Pardon me if I don’t feel
like digging up ancient history,” he says. “I have no wish to reminisce about
old times.”
“I get that you’re mad at me—”
Mal slams his fist down on the edge of the table and I
jump, again feeling the pain ripple through me.
“Mad? Mad?” He shakes his head, his face twisted with
disgust. “You continue to underestimate me, Benjamin.”
I take a deep breath. “So why am I here? You didn’t need
to fish me out of the water.”
Mal takes a deep breath, too, smoothing his long hair
back from his face where it had fallen. He straightens his jacket. His face
returns to its impassive state. “My people saw the wreckage in the water. Fresh
wreckage.” He shrugs. “Old habits. They were checking for salvage . . . and
information.”
“What kind of information?”
“What do you think, Benjamin? You’re telling me that if
you saw that kind of fallout, it wouldn’t attract your attention? We’re
operating in these waters. Knowing what’s happening around us is only prudent.”
I try to process all of this, and it’s hard with the
painkillers dragging on my thoughts. C’mon,
Ben. Get it together. I return to the phrase “we’re operating in these
waters.” Could Mal be working with Gastown?
I look back up at him to see him
examining my face.
“Are you working with Gastown?” I ask. It isn’t subtle,
and it’s not what I had planned to say (as far as I planned anything) but it
just spills out.
He squints, then shakes his head. “No. Neither in its
former nor current incarnations.”
That’s how Mal likes to speak. Never a simple word when a
more ornate one will do. In that way he’s a little like Miranda.
I nod. “Those were Gastown ships in the water. Them and
the Cherub.” I feel a pain when I
mention my airship. I’ve heard tell of people having phantom pains in lost
limbs. Could you have that for an airship?
“I know this already,” Mal says.
“Your companion told me.”
I frown. “You still haven’t told me why I’m here, then.
If Miranda told you what happened, you could have dropped me back in the
ocean.”
“I thought of it,” he says with a
smile. “Believe me, I thought of it.” “But?”
“I wanted you to see me. I wanted you to know that I
survived.” He waves a hand in the air, nonchalantly. “I have no illusions that
it will provoke a response, but I needed you to know.”
I nod. It’s classic Mal. His ego has always been one of
his most developed attributes.
“So now
that I know, now you toss me in the ocean?”
His face
goes serious. “No.”
“No?”
“No. Your
companion and I—”
“Miranda.”
“. . .
Miranda and I came to an agreement.”
My head is still swimming, and none of this is making
sense. Mal is alive. And wants to kill me. Yet I’m still alive. And he made a deal
with Miranda?
“We always have need for people with medical training,”
he says. He shrugs. “She made her skills known to me. But . . .” He pauses for
a moment. “She’s quite shrewd. She insisted that she demonstrate her skills. On
you.”
It’s such a nice piece of negotiation that I can’t help
smiling. It’s the kind of thing I usually try to do—identify a need, make
myself useful, benefit. She not only secured a safe space for herself, but she
saved me in the process.
“All I can say is that you’re very lucky,” Mal says. “None
of my people would have worked on you. Not in your state. Not without
quarantine. And you probably would have died, otherwise. I locked her in here
with you, with some medical supplies, and she worked on you through the
quarantine period. That you’re alive, and awake, is a testament to her
abilities.”
“She’s one
of the best.”
He nods. “That, we can agree on. How she chose to
associate with you . . .”
“People change, Mal.”
The look he gives me sends chills
through me. It’s like being in a room with a wild animal—a wolf or a cougar.
Mal clearly hates me. He has lots of reason to, I’ll admit, but he also has all
the power here. I keep trying to kick my brain out of the painkiller fuzz, but
it’s slow going, all uphill, and gravity’s pulling at me. Miranda had been thinking
quickly, making herself useful, saving me. Now I have to do my part. “Mal, I—”
He quiets me by holding up his hand. “Please don’t,
Benjamin. I can see the achingly slow grinding of your mind’s gears. You’re
going to try to give me reasons not to kill you.”
Damn.
“The thing is, Benjamin, I had a plan; one I thought
poetic. I would leave you in the ocean, all alone, with no wings to carry you.
With no friends to aid you. Leave you in the great vastness and just . . . sail
away. I could take odds on what would get you first—a shark? some other ship?
drowning?”
The thought
scares me more than I ever imagined it could.
“But I’m
not.”
“Why?”
Mal rubs at a spot on his left glove. “That was the other
part of my agreement with Miranda. Her terms were that she get to demonstrate
her skills on you, and . . . that I keep you alive until we reach our
destination.”
Thank God, I think.
He must see the relief on my face
because he says, “What I promised her, exactly, was that I would keep you on
the ship. And that I wouldn’t take any action to harm you. And so I won’t.
Because it doesn’t matter.” He smiles at me. “Once we arrive, however, I will
have my moment. Believe me when I say that I’ve been imagining all the many
things I might do with you at that point.”
Another scary feeling, this time one that sticks like a
rock in my gut. Just then, my mind clears a bit more and I realize what he just
said and that the rocking sensation I’m feeling isn’t completely from the
drugs. “Did you say ‘ship’?” It’s not an airship—I would know if it was. “Are
we on the water?”
“Your speed is as remarkable as
always,” Mal says.
“Cut me a
little slack,” I say. “I’ve had a lot of painkillers.”
“I am aware,” he says, glaring at me. He sighs. “Yes, you
are on board a ship right now. A warship. She’s called the Phoenix.”
“You stole
her?”
He looks at
me, sharp, assessing. Like a bird. “I recovered her.”
Of course you did, I think.
“She was secured in a naval
facility. My people and I liberated her.”
It’s a score, of course. Military
targets have long been a flame the foraging moths have flown to over the years,
but as a result the pickings are slim. Even if you do find something intact
worth taking, the effort of getting it operational, being able to run it, is
often too much. There are plenty of rotting old hulks in naval yards and off
the coast. That he found one and managed to get it to work. . . .
“It took years to get it running,” he says. “Time during
which my people were vulnerable.” He smiles. “But in the end we were
triumphant.”
Jesus, I think. A warship. In Mal’s hands.
“The weapons?” I ask.
His smile grows wider. “Almost completely operational.
That was one of the most difficult parts. She was partly stocked, but making
sure everything worked and was loaded properly took some time.”
“I don’t believe it,” I say.
His smile is predatory and triumphant. “That is because
you have no imagination. We achieved a great victory, here, my people and I.
And it will be our salvation.”
The word makes me uneasy.
Especially in the Sick. “So you live here.”
He nods. “In some ways, the ocean is
safer than the sky.” I find the words distasteful, but they make me think of
Tamoanchan, an island settlement I recently visited. I think of Diego and
Rosie, Sergei, even Clay. All the people Miranda and I left behind. I thought
that sacrificing the Cherub might
have saved them from attack, but that didn’t mean more wouldn’t be coming.
I needed off this ship.
“Where are you sailing it?” I ask.
“Hawaii.”
A legend of sorts. I’ve met people
who determined to go there, lured by the promise of old magazines and books.
“You know it’s overrun with Ferals, right?”
He shrugs. “That’s the rumor. But it’s a series of
islands. And by now the Ferals should have dwindled, equalized to a stable
number. We can take our time to clean them out. And if the idea of it keeps
others away, then all the better. If their maps already say, ‘Here there be
monsters,’ then why disabuse them of that notion?”
I shake my head. “That’s the life you’re going to lead?
Doesn’t seem suited to someone like you.”
“Things
change,” is all he says.
I chew on it for a bit. Mal was on
his way to a leadership position the first time I met him, but he seems to have
taken it quite seriously. Seriously enough to risk his life on a dream. Miranda
bought me some time. But then what? Even if he doesn’t kill me right away,
we’ll be stuck there. With no way of getting off.
“Things do change,” I say. “Let me
prove it to you.”
Mal laughs.
“You?”
I can’t help frowning at him.
“Oh, Benjamin. I see what you
mean. You’ve developed a sense of humor.” “Mal—”
“No.” The word is as hard and cold
as stone. “I don’t care if you’ve changed. If you can grow wings or if you shit
out my heart’s desire on command. I have you. And I’m taking you with us until
I can deal with you in the appropriate way.” He leans forward. “Do you get
that? You are mine.” He turns to leave. “Meditate on that on our journey.”
Then he
leaves me to my solitude.
* * *
They
move me to something more resembling a cell shortly later, something that was
probably a bunk back in the Clean. There’s a simple bed, a sink, and a toilet.
I suppose it could be worse. I could have to shit on the floor.
They feed me, too. Scraps and slop, but it’s something. I
guess Mal’s sticking to his promise to Miranda. I can imagine him rationalizing
it, too. Telling himself he’ll punish me at a time and place of his choosing.
He has an overdeveloped sense of honor. Something tells me that Miranda picked
up on that and used it against him.
Thinking of Miranda sends a pang through me—not knowing
where she is, or how she is. What she’s doing. How Mal’s treating her.
There’s no way that he’s going to
let her see me. That will be off-limits, even if she wants to, but. . . . But
there’s this strange, nagging voice inside my head that says maybe she doesn’t want
to see me. I don’t think it makes sense, but it still pipes up from time to
time. I keep trying to stamp it down.
And this is the problem with being stuck with no one but
yourself. With no books or music or people to talk to. You start having crazy
thoughts. In one of these, Mal charms Miranda and, well, let’s just say she
responds.
I’m definitely going to go crazy in here.
Of course I search my cell for
means of escape but, well, there doesn’t seem to be any. The door to the room
is locked from the outside, and there are no windows or other openings inside.
There is the toilet, but judging by its dimensions, the hole beneath it would
be too small for me to squeeze through.
Just one
book, I think. One
book. It wouldn’t even matter which one. Once, when I was holed up in an
old house that just happened to sit next to a Feral nest, I read the same book
four times. In a row. And it was about rabbits. Another time, when Dad had
dropped me off on a rooftop, circling around to pick me up later (and got
delayed), I read the same romance novel twice, the second time acting out all
the parts. I sometimes go to great lengths to pass the time.
A short time later, my food arrives.
Those scraps and slop. It’s skins and rinds and cores, cartilage and bone. The
vegetables are just shy of rotting, the fish is too soft and has a smell that
almost makes me gag. Something that was once leafy and green is now a muddy
smear. Yet I open my mouth and shovel as much as I can in. Because I need to
eat, and I’m hungry. I need to heal. That I don’t enjoy it doesn’t really come
into it. Much. It helps that I’ve been on my own and hungry for much of my
adult life. I’ve eaten all kinds of things out of desperation. This is
tolerable at its worst. Or at least that’s what I tell myself.
Especially every time I start to gag.
I start marking the days on my mattress, scoring lines
into the fabric covering. One. Two. Three.
I start talking to myself. Except that quickly that loses
all appeal. I’m a terrible conversationalist.
So I start thinking about the old days. About the last
time I saw Mal.
It wasn’t a good time.
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If you haven't already, don't forget to pick up a copy of the first book, Falling Sky!
